Musings on ballet, classical music, the violin, and life
The Classical Girl Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s the height of summer, and if you’re like me, you’re feeling a vacation-y torpor in the air, alongside the heat (or maybe as a result of the heat). You want to do something indulgent for yourself in the evening when it’s light for so long that you feel … Read more
This weekend our extended family is gathering to honor the life of our sister, Maureen Snead, who passed away on April 8th of this year. Today at her Celebration of Life, I read a little (okay, it’s long for “little”) thank-you note I penned. It’s not a eulogy or an obituary — it’s a … Read more
I was driving when I heard Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto the first time. It was a library CD I’d just borrowed, back in the days when most cars had a CD or cassette player and you could borrow handfuls of new music from the library. I was trundling down our hill in the Santa … Read more
Confession: it never crossed my mind that people listened to Handel’s 1741 Messiah as an Advent or Christmas seasonal thing until I was an adult attending classical music events on a regular basis. I myself listen to it around Easter, because, well, that’s how I grew up hearing it. It was a family thing in … Read more
San Francisco Ballet’s Program 4, opening on Tuesday March 15, brings something elusive and wonderful to the stage in the form of two ballets, La Sylphide and Alexei Ratmansky’s The Seasons. Both hold an element of “Oh, finally!” and both help celebrate and commemorate this, artistic director Helgi Tomasson’s 37th and final season at the helm … Read more